The SitePoint Forums have moved.

You can now find them here.
This forum is now closed to new posts, but you can browse existing content.
You can find out more information about the move and how to open a new account (if necessary) here.
If you get stuck you can get support by emailing forums@sitepoint.com

If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

I need some recommendations. I run an online regional guide to our community, Scarsdale, NY - ScarsdaleNet.com, currently undergoing a complete redesign and soon to be replaced with a new site under a new name.

When I developed the site two years ago, I used WebAdverts, a set of perl scripts from awsd.com, for banner management. It was OK and I figured out how to do zoning, etc. with it.

Last year, when I did a site redesign, I purchased CentralAd 4.0 from CentralAd, for a hefty $495. It was written in C and was supposed to be faster. Plus its zoning and reporting were much more robust.

However, over the past year, I've had real difficulty with it - many too many banners going to default and inconceivable click-thru ratios. Some ads were getting 10%, 20%, even 400% click-thrus. Yes - it was sometimes reporting things like 20 clicks on 5 impressions for an ad on an out-of-the-way page! It was really buggy.

In April I joined the Advertising.com ad network, serving the ads through the CentralAd code embedded in all my pages. Well, it didn't take more than two months for them to start complaining and another month before they threw me off the network. Then I joined ValueClick and it took a month for them to get rid of me, too. They both said my statistics were indicative of fraud.

So now it's painfully obvious CentralAd is a dog that has to be gotten rid of. But I don't know what to replace it with. I don't want to spend another $500 on ad software either.

I need recommendations for a good ad banner management system - written in perl or C. It can use mySQL for the backend, too, because I have it available but that's not necessary.

I also need to be able to serve up banner ads across websites as I am establishing a series of websites under the banner The Westchester Network and want to deliver ads using zones across each of the sites from a central location. My current site pushes 10,000 visitors and 30,000 pageviews, but my new series of sites I am hoping to do much better.

I've checked out AdCycle at AdCycle.com, but while it's gotten good reviews and is cheap, the documentation sucks and I feel the product overall is rather unprofessional.

I don't really want to go back to WebAdverts, but I will if I have to.

Edwin - I visited the AdJuggler site and reviewed the demo and found it a very confusing interface. I can't figure out its method for targetting ads (is that what they're call "pooling"?) CentralAd was less pretty, but more user-friendly. Too bad it was so buggy. I know AdJuggler has good reviews, but I'm leary of the price tag.

As for Adrunner, I visited the site and asked for more info. I got some info that included the pricing. You pay on a CPM-served basis. For sites pushing up to 100,000 impressions, you pay $0.79 per CPM or $79. Prices are lower in higher quantities. Contracts are for siz-month periods.

So if you only push 100,000 ads in a six-month period. That's great. You get a nice system for only $158 a year.

I guess I'm leary of that arrangement in the sense that, as an online regional guide (and just like any other site), it's tough getting arvertisers (I could use a marketing salesman) and the ad networks pay squat.

And if I push a minimum of 25,000 pageviews a month and put a 468x60 ad banner and a 120x60 ad button on each page, that's 50,000 ads served a month. In six-month's time I'd push 300,000 ads and must pay the 500,000-ad package prices of $245.

It's ridiculous that I have grabbed a large share of the online market in my geographic area and can't get good paying advertisers. But that's the facts. Right now I'm filling ad space with network and affiliate ads.

Or course just about everything made by phpwizard.net is awesome. Their phpPoll app is awesome too. I perfectly integrated it into my site in less than a day and it looks seamless. Of course phpMyAdmin is extremely popular, but that's a given.

I called Engage Media about their Ad Bureau product. There is a setup fee of $5000 or so, then monthly minimum costs of $800. Out of my league. If you want to buy their Ad Manager software, you're talking about $15,000 or so. I am not in that league.

I have a call outstanding with DoubleClick about DART, but I'm afraid that will be in the same ballpark. I just emailed AdForce for pricing info.

I got excited when d3v mentioned phpAds. Even though it is a PHP product, you can still serve ads remotely. And it's free. However, it does not do any zoning/grouping/targetting. PhpAds is just a straight vanilla rotator.

I need zoning so I can to track/monitor performance at my different sites.

It's free, you can set up accounts for clients, handles zones, farms, banners of all sizes, you can serve ads remotely and some other features I cannot remember.
It works off an Access database but you could upsize it easily to SQL Server.

Just to let you know - I decided upon and purchased Advert Pro, a Perl/mySQL system available for $450 athttp://www.advertpro.com

Even though it's been only a couple of days, I am very impressed with this script. You can have unlimited customer "accounts", ad "regions", and standard ad banners/buttons plus rich media items.

You pick the region/ads you want and click on Generate Code and the system puts out javascript code you insert into your pages/templates. This javascript calls your ads plus provides the system with excellent tracking stats - like referrer, browser type, OS, and much more.

It's got excellent zoning/targetting capabilities because of this. For instance, if I'm selling ISP services, I can say that I only want my ISP banners saying "Tired of Busy Signals?" to be displayed to AOL users. That's pretty sophisticated at this price range, I think.

And it's very fast. Yes, it is more than I wanted to spend, but it seems to be exactly what I need for the time being.

Right now I'm installing it across 13 sites, each with a 120x60 ad button and a 468x60 ad banner in the page header - that's 26 "regions". (See any ScarsdaleToday.com and any of the other sites listed in the page header.)